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TUBAC, Arlz. CAP) — It’s just a massive, underground nest withoutits bird now.For 20 years, a towering steel sen-tfy lived here, inside Site 1-6, in the bowels of a hillside about a mile west of Interstate 19, a sentinel of potential nuclear destruction to the country’s enemies.Now, the aged Titan 2 missile is gone, and its home is an elaborate, empty concrete and steel silo sunk 146 feet into the Arizona earth, a huge hole in the ground in the process of being mothballed.Titan Site 1-6 is the second of the 18 ringing Tucson in southeastern Arizona to undergo deactivaton as the first part of the Air Force’s program to retire the intercontinental ballistic missiles. Seventeen Titans in Arkansas and another 17 in Kansas will be taken out of service later.The 103-foot-tall, 10-foot-wide, 330,000-pound missile was drained of its toxic liquid propellants. Its nuclear warhead was removed before it was taken from the ground a month ago to go into storage. „The site urill be manned for two more weeks while it goes through what is equivalent to being boarded up —put in caretaker status. Then the support systems will be turned off and the site unmanned.“You close the door and padlock it,” said Col. John Chambers, vice commander of the 390th Strategic Missile Wing at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, which operates the Titans in Arizona.“In strategic arms talks, it’s not the missiles that count, it’s the sites,” Chambers added.From above-ground, the . only thing to see inside the cyclone-fenced acre compound, other than a bunch of communications antennas, a wind recorder and several sensor devices, is a eonerete-and-steel door measuring about 80 feet square. It weighs 740 tons — or 1,480,000 pounds — and covers the silo. It was supposed to be able to withstand all but a direct nuclear hit.And it still can roll open on its railroad car wheels in 17 to 21 seconds to reveal the gaping, nine-level, 55-foot-wide hole.The crew has four members work-in** 9J-hnnr shifte Th#»v /W’fiinv theconcrete-and steel control center about 30 feet underground, 120 feet from the maintenance and equipment silo that houses the missile launching duct — a gigantic cylinder within a cylinder.HIMNEY SWEEPANDMINOR REPAIRSOf All Types763-8904
Newspaper Details
Blytheville Courier News
Blytheville, Arkansas, US
Wed, Dec 22, 1982
Page 34
Full Page
Clipped by
Arkansas S.
AR, USA 25 Feb 2020
Other Publications Near Blytheville, Arkansas
Blytheville Army Air Corps News
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